Further Reading

Find resources related to sharecropping and the Southern economy on this page, or access a general bibliography for Reconstruction in the State by State section of this site.

Web sites

Farm Security Administration Photographs
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/fsaall:@FILREQ(@field
(SUBJ+@band(Sharecroppers--Alabama+))+@FIELD(COLLID+fsa))
The Library of Congress's American Memory Web site publishes over 160,000 photographs taken during the 1930s and 1940s by the Farm Security Administration. This selection of 78 photographs documents Alabama sharecroppers, several generations removed from slavery.

Economic and Social Conditions of North Carolina Farmers
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/ncfarmers/farmers.html
Part of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South archive, this survey of 1000 farmers in three North Carolina counties was published in 1922. It details family food supplies, cash income and credit, education, and other aspects of tenant farmers' lives.

America's Reconstruction: Free Labor
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/reconstruction/section3/section3_free.html
The Digital History Web site, a collaboration between the University of Houston, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and other institutions, presents an online version of Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney's exhibit on Reconstruction. This section describes the transition from slave labor to free labor, and includes a gallery of photographs.

American Experience: Fatal Flood
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/flood/
A natural disaster in 1927 Mississippi pits white landowners against their African American tenant farmers. The site includes information on sharecropper migration North in the early 20th century.

Books

Davis, Ronald L. F. Good and Faithful Labor: A Study in the Origins, Development, and Economics of Southern Sharecropping, 1860-1880. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1974.

Holt, Sharon Ann. Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865-1900. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Katz, William Loren. Eyewitness: A Living Documentary of the African American Contribution to American History. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

Magdol, Edward. A Right to the Land: Essays on the Freedmen's Community. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.

Rodrigue, John C. Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes, 1862-1880. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Royce, Edward. The Origins of Southern Sharecropping. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.

Saville, Julie. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Sterling, Dorothy, ed. The Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

Reconstruction: The Second Civil War
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